I feel like a boy who’s been told that there’s no Christmas this year. The news from Mike Pink is that there may not be Camino 8 until next year. The last milestone release of Camino came out in early March, and since then there has been the huge upheaval of AOL sending Mozilla out to fend for itself. Mike is now one of a very small team (I’d heard it was 3?) developers working on Camino. Its great that he won’t let it die, but frustrating that there aren’t more hands to help. It seems that Camino’s direction, development and communication all rests heavily on the shoulders of someone who has a life too, and simply hasn’t the time.
For those OS X users who haven’t tried Mozilla’s Camino, these are my reasons for using it over Safari:
- Configurable search bar (Add as many as you search engines as you like - although it would be nice if there was an interface within Camino to do this, rather than editing a .plist file.)
- Configurable pop-up blocker - choose which sites you allow pop-ups from
- Better CSS rendering (I.E Mozilla’s!)
- Tooltips - rather than Safari’s illegible status bar
- Proper display of page titles
- Send link facility
- A true OS X style customizable toolbar
- Option to prevent sites resizing your window. (I hate that - its like having a stranger come up to you in the street and reorganise your clothes).
Having said that, Safari has autofill, the ability to spoof user agents, and an elegant interface. Camino’s buttons make it look as rough as an old badger, and uses standard OS X tabs, which doesn’t help.
I don’t want Camino to go. Its a great little browser, with fantastic potential, but I fear the silence and passing of time with no roadmap or release dates will mean that it will just grind to a halt.